The Cynic and the Lame Duck President

It seems that he knows how to fight—really fight—only when his back is against the wall. And now, with the two years left in his presidency off to an extraordinary start, he has at last decided to force the issue of himself on the country that elected him twice.

For two weeks, Charles P. Pierce is taking a hard-earned and well-deserved vacation. As such, we're re-promoting some of the greatest pieces he's written on President Barack Obama for Esquire over the last several years. We hope that the insights in these classic stories help contextualize other happenings you might find in your daily news feed. This afternoon, a look back on a piece published early this year, the third chapter of his Cynicseries. In it, Pierce examines the options Obama has before him in the rest of his term as president, and how he might wield the power he has while he has it. —The Editors

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There was winter on the wind. Leaves danced a clamorous dance along the sidewalk and down the alleys, and there was nobody you could see in the streets, or in the shop windows, or hanging around the little town square. Lunchtime had passed and the cafés were empty. The small library on North Main Street showed some signs of life, some small movements in the light of the windows as the afternoon began to fade. It was a dead-level, gray time between seasons. It was a quiet election that day in Clarion, Iowa, an election that did not disturb the oncoming hibernation of the place, and there was winter on the wind.

The cynic was in Clarion to watch the political seasons change for the final time in the presidency of Barack Obama. It was in a place very much like this in 2008 that the cynic saw the president, but that was in midwinter, a season frozen in place, established, all its potential fulfilled. There was bright sunshine on the snow everywhere you looked, and the place was called Freedom, and it was in Wisconsin. This was what the cynic thought that day.

He's an impermeable man now. He is smooth and clean, and there's nothing jagged or dangling or out of place. He seems to have emerged into this campaign, and into this moment in history, fully formed. One of the chief—and most deadly accurate—criticisms of Hillary Clinton was that her entire campaign was based on the inevitability of her nomination. The cynic has watched Barack Obama on fifteen different stages in fifteen different places in three states, and even here, even through the static on the radio, the cynic realizes that nobody ever thought Hillary Clinton was as inevitable a president of the United States as Barack Obama believes himself to be.

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The cynic had followed that belief through the previous six years. He had followed it through the election of 2008, when it looked like a watershed moment, and he had followed it through the savage backlash election of 2010, when the country jumped at shadows and it fought its trembling fear by remembering how to hate and it brought itself to elect the worst Congress in the history of the republic. He had followed it through the election of 2012, when the president brilliantly outmaneuvered an outmatched Willard Romney, running again with that same obvious internal faith in his own inevitability that had first driven him to the office he held, confounding only those opponents and only those pundits who didn't see that for what it was, who thought that was simply arrogance or vanity, who tore up the language to find synonyms for uppity, because that is not a word to be used idly in referring to this president. No person can—no person should—ever be elected president who doesn't see himself as the only person up to the job at that particular moment in history. In the meantime, between the elections, and throughout his term, the country that had learned again how to hate refined its talent in that regard to a fine, pure essence. There was a transparency to the hate. It was clear and strong, the way the best moonshine is, what the old Irish hill runners call the poteen, the stuff through which you can read a newspaper, as long as you can still see well enough to read anything. The Republican party drank itself blind on the stuff, and so did the movement conservatism that is the Republican party's only real animating force, and so did the conservative media and everyone who lived inside the information bubble that had been so carefully crafted over the previous three decades. Important legislators met in secret on the day the president was inaugurated and agreed that they would blow up centuries of legislative custom and politesse and simply refuse to allow the president to govern. The Republicans abandoned some of their own ideas—an insurance-friendly approach to health-care reform, a cap-and-trade strategy to combat climate change, comprehensive immigration reform, and infrastructure spending—simply because Barack Obama had proposed them and his name had become a conjuring word for the angry spirits of the conservative base.

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For himself, the president never seemed to understand the true nature, or the true virulence, of the political opposition arrayed against him. He seemed baffled by the political saliency of utter unreality. He seemed puzzled by the spectacle of elected officials who believed that they were doing their jobs by not doing those jobs at all. He wrestled the country away from the edge of an economic abyss, but that was all he did, and it was all he was allowed to do. He wound down two wars, but the violence never stopped. He passed the first national health-care law in the country's history, fulfilling a goal of which every one of his predecessors had fallen short, and he saw it turned into a charnel house of imaginary horrors to the point where the polls indicated that people liked every part of the law except for the fact that his name was on it.

In his time, elections themselves changed. In the states, conservative legislatures passed law after law to curb phantom voter fraud that were aimed at inconveniencing, or simply suppressing outright, the franchise as exercised by the same people who had elected the president twice. In two decisions that framed both his terms, the Supreme Court utterly transformed the American political process. First, in its Citizens United and McCutcheon decisions, the court shredded what few campaign-finance laws were left on the books, throwing the country's elections back into the first Gilded Age. In addition, not long after the president had been sworn in for a second time, the Court gutted the enforcement provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This encouraged and accelerated the push for voter-suppression laws that already was well begun out in the states. It was not an accident of history that the Era of Jim Crow began in the heart of the original Gilded Age. It was not an accident of history that the new Era of Jim Crow began in the heart of a new Gilded Age. The country was sliding toward oligarchy, and all the institutional safeguards against it were dropping one by one. The president, who had run, and who had won, as a transformational figure in the country's politics, now saw himself presiding over rapidly shifting political dynamics that would not have been unfamiliar to Theodore Roosevelt.

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And now it was 2014, and it was time for another national election, and that was why the cynic had come to Clarion in the failing light of a cloudy afternoon. He had come to talk to a Democratic candidate named Jim Mowrer, and Mowrer was a candidate of the times. He had been shaped by the events that had so changed the country since the fall of 2001, the events that had led to one administration's constitutional heresies and unremitting disasters, natural and otherwise, a record that had, in turn, led to the election of Barack Obama, which had made him inevitable in 2008. Mowrer was young, and he was a veteran of the wars of the early twenty-first century. He was running against an incumbent named Steve King, a bug-eyed xenophobe and the leader of the virulently anti-immigrant faction within the Republican majority in the House of Representatives.

Mowrer sat on the front porch of a house in Clarion and talked with the cynic for a while about what he wanted to do when he got to Washington, and how King had become so enamored of his role as a national conservative blowhard that he'd forgotten his constituents back in Iowa. The cynic listened politely and he liked Mowrer a great deal, but the cynic also felt the day darkening all around him. The autumn evening doesn't descend on the fields around places like Clarion, Iowa. It envelops them from all sides.

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There had been a premonitory chill running through the politics of the recent months. There was a new and more brutal insurgency—called either ISIS or ISIL, depending on which side of the administration you were on—that was running amok in the same region that the United States had spent twelve years destabilizing. There was the sudden—if very limited—appearance in this country of the Ebola virus, a deadly illness that was devastating the countries in the western part of Africa. The country's blood was running cold. It was fearful again, and you could almost sense how it was warming itself again by remembering how to hate.

The cynic remembered his first impressions of Barack Obama, six years earlier, how his Catholic instincts had warned him that Obama was making a mistake in offering the country absolution without demanding penance from it for abandoning its responsibility of self-government and thereby allowing all the sins that the previous administration had committed, which was the biggest sin of all because it fell on all of us. In December, right before Christmas, the Senate released the executive summary of the report produced by its investigation of the American way of torture, a document that made clear, in detail, that any concept of American exceptionalism based on something as fragile as the rule of law—in fact, any concept of it based on anything except brute force—had been rendered a disgraceful farce. The country would pay no penance.

It was remarkable that the president had done as much as he had in the face of a country that, having been absolved of its sins without ever having atoned for them, went right back to committing them all over again—sloth in governing itself, wrath upon its fellow citizens, gluttony in its appetite for indulgent ignorance, and greed for virtue it had not earned. If the president believed in his inevitability, the cynic believed just as strongly in the country's reaction to it.

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How'd he manage to do it? the cynic wondered, because the cynic was still capable of wonder. How'd he manage to accomplish anything, anything at all, in the face of that? The young soldier running for Congress would be destroyed by the old reprobate King, and the Republicans would be rewarded with the prize of the United States Senate for having made sure that the country had achieved paralysis the previous two years. The cynic stood on the sidewalk near the old brick county courthouse in Iowa. Leaves danced around his feet. Clarion had fallen silent, and there was winter on the wind.

Pete Souza

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It struck the cynic that after the 2010 midterms, when the president admitted that he had taken a "shellacking," he had not done what Bill Clinton did after a similar defeat in the midterms of 1994, which was to adopt the softer edges of harsh Republican policy ideas and make them his own. But in 2010, Barack Obama didn't do that. The defeat in the midterm elections didn't seem to faze him at all, let alone compel him to change course.

He held a meeting of his staff in the immediate wake of the midterms and read them a formidable list of things he still planned to accomplish over the two years before he would have to stand for reelection. He would not do what Clinton did, which was to adapt Republican ideas to fit his own agenda. He had tried that, but now the Republicans had slapped their own policy positions down, ridiculing them as "socialism" or worse, and had just been rewarded at the polls for doing so. No matter. He would proceed with his own agenda regardless of the obstacles. As journalist David Corn recounts, one of Obama's shell-shocked advisors mused, "What does he see that we don't?" Later, at a press conference, Obama explained that "we were in such a hurry to get things done that we didn't change how things got done."

He continued to seek the help and cooperation of a Republican party that had gone visibly mad. (The stubbornness with which he persisted drove the liberal base of his own party to distraction.) He was spurned, time and time again, until some people thought he was vulnerable. But he pressed on and he won a smashing reelection over Romney. The Republican party was said to have fallen into deep contemplation over how things had gone so badly wrong, but it emerged from its funk having reenergized nothing but its appetite for obstruction. The results were now in. Having been reelected, the president had been shellacked again, and worse. He would spend the final two years in the White House facing an entire Congress dedicated to obstruction, a pack of vandals with subpoena power and the blood of gelded swine on their fingers. The cynic wondered what would happen, there in his hotel in Des Moines, with downtown so quiet and still.

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He never thought of this president as a lame duck. There always had been something perpetual about him, as though he always would be part of something historical and alive, a sense of his continuing inevitability. He would continue to be president in the way he believed history had wanted him to be president. A week later, the president announced a sweeping executive order fundamentally changing the immigration process in the country. The Republicans howled and then, strangely, they couldn't figure out what in the hell to do about it.

But the president wasn't done. For good measure, just before Christmas, he freed Cuba. Because Americans like freedom.

The phrase, it is said, was born in the London Stock Exchange not long before American futures took a dive in 1776. It referred to brokers who defaulted on their debts. It referred to a duck no longer able to stay with the flock and therefore very likely to end up a meal somewhere on a higher end of the food chain. It achieved political salience in this country when it was applied to politicians who had been defeated for reelection but who still had to serve out the balance of their previous term. It was not applied to successful politicians until 1951, when the states ratified the Twenty-second Amendment, which limited the president to two terms. Thereafter, as soon as a president was reelected, the clock began ticking and the duck became lame.

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Before then, presidents in their second term were considered to be as powerful as they had been in their first, but only if they remained aware of the changes in the country that they themselves already had wrought. In 1940, historian Matthew Josephson drew attention to an obscure letter written to President Woodrow Wilson in 1919 by a man named George L. Record, a progressive from New Jersey who had been one of Wilson's principal advisors during his rise from the governorship of that state to the presidency. Wilson was in his second term. He had led the country into World War I and the Allies had won, and now Wilson was in Paris, dreaming of a world without war and, not coincidentally, a world in which his own rarefied notions of himself would achieve continual vindication down through the years.

Record had been shunted aside by Wilson's other advisors. He had been horrified by the domestic repressions that had accompanied Wilson's decision to bring the United States into the war. What Josephson called Wilson's "lonely pride" had appealed well to Wilson's authoritarian Calvinism, with tragic results. In his letter, Record tried to break through that pride and to reorient Wilson's vision from a desire to remake the world to a desire to renew the progressive ideals that had brought him to the presidency in the first place. Record warned Wilson that Wilson was politically weaker than he knew, that the country had come to see in Wilson's grandiose international plans an insufferable arrogance.

"… Nothing you have done as President, nothing you have been proposing in the League of Nations idea, will give you a place in history as a great man," Record wrote, "because at the end of your terms you will have rendered no great and lasting service that will lift you above the average of our Presidents, and you have ignored the great issue which is slowly coming to the front, the question of economic democracy, abolition of privilege, and securing to men the full fruits of their labor or service."

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That, suggested George Record to his former political protégé, was the way Wilson could restore the faith of the people who had put him into office, to leverage two elections into enduring political opportunity. Wilson ignored him, fought for his wonderful dreams, and killed himself by degrees. The country then slid into the Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties, and the question of economic democracy got buried under stock ticker tape until everything collapsed entirely in 1929.

Barack Obama became president in the wake of the worst collapse since then. It had been a sudden, shocking tectonic shift in so many things that Americans had taken for granted, a dizzying shift in the fundaments of the country. It had come after a decade of foreign wars, amid the wreckage of other grand internationalist fantasies, a sweep of democratic energy through a part of the world that never had evinced any great desire for it. It had come after a decade of contempt for intellect, for science, for expertise in everything from geopolitics to economics and back again. It had come after a decade in which reason had surrendered to emotion, a decade of the id in politics. It had come after a decade of increasing economic inequality back home, exacerbated by the economic collapse, as two wars were conducted off the books. That was the country Barack Obama was handed in 2008.

He saved the auto industry, and he probably saved the economy. He got some Wall Street regulations passed, and he fought for his health-care law even as the country seemed to lose its mind on the topic. But what he seemed to believe was his basic calling, the basis for his sense of his own inevitability, kept getting in the way. There were indeed red states and blue states, and the people of the United States remained fully capable of dividing themselves as their fears and anger dictated.

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There were no apparent consequences for the people who had done the primary damage. There was no penance, just absolution. His liberal base was disappointed with what he didn't do. His conservative opposition was enraged by what he did do. What he didn't do, however, was change. Not when his party lost in 2010. Not when he'd won in 2012. And now, the cynic thought, the president's party had been handed another beating. If he were going to be a lame duck, then this would be the moment in which that began. But, again, armored in that sense of his own inevitability that had been the first thing the cynic had noticed in him, there was no telling what might happen.

What does he see? the cynic thought. What does this president see that nobody else ever does?

For more than a year, frustrated at the Republican House's refusal to bring to a vote a bipartisan immigration-reform bill, the president threatened to do everything he considered within his power to act on the issue unilaterally. In response, the Republicans puffed themselves and issued dire threats. They called him a tyrant. They called him a dictator. They threatened to sue him, and ultimately did, but over the health-care law. They whispered darkly about impeaching him, about how he was destructive of the rule of law. They won the election, and by a large margin almost everywhere. They assumed control of the Senate. The threats and admonitions grew louder.

Then, on November 20, the president walked into the East Room and did precisely what he'd been saying he was going to do. He acted on his own authority to take sweeping action on immigration reform. Specifically, he told about five million undocumented immigrants that they would not be subject to deportation for at least three years. There was an immediate outcry from the newly ascendant Republicans, and there was even more loud constitutional opéra bouffe.But that was obscured by video of weeping, happy families, waving American flags and smiling for the cameras, and the fuming was drowned out by a chorus of people talking about how they now were out of the shadows, about how their fear was gone.

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This was a fiercely liberating moment, the cynic thought. Both for those families and for the president who had brought it about, who still insisted that cooperative action was possible even with an opposition that likely would be even more rabid, even less reluctant to give him anything of what he wanted. No matter what was air ily speculated by the pundits who believed that, now that it had won the Senate, and more seats in the House, and more state legislative chambers than ever before, the opposition somehow would be forced to "govern." Of course, refusing to govern had won them the elections—and, at least in the case of the House, the support of 52 percent of the 36 percent of the American people who had deigned to vote. But none of that had seemed to matter at that moment to the president or to the people who had heard him speak.

Can he grab the moment? the cynic wondered, and the cynic realized that it would be the last thing he ever would wonder about this smooth and edgeless president who seemed so often to be unsurprised by anything in his career except the virulence of the opposition—and that was the one thing about this president's career that the cynic ever really thought he understood. It appeared, with his decision on immigration, and by the reaction to it, that he has decided to force the issue, his administration, and his legitimacy as president. He has decided to force the issue of himself on the country that elected him twice.

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There's one thing about the president that took the cynic a long time to understand, and he didn't truly understand it until he heard the president refer to "the hard and frustrating but necessary work of self-government." Put simply, in so many areas, the president is putting the responsibility of governing—of leadership—on us, which is where it should be. We shouldn't need a president to start a conversation on race. We should start it ourselves, in thousands of town halls and church basements and radio talk shows. But as a self-governing democracy, we are too cowardly to do it honestly, because it rubs up against the comfortable myth of American exceptionalism. We have surrendered the basic, questioning courage it takes to run a self-governing political commonwealth for the anesthetic lassitude of national self-esteem. That is the bluff this president has called.

That's been the fundamental challenge of him from the outset. He's left the hard and necessary work of self-government to a country that simply is no longer up to the job. If all Barack Obama's administration has done is to become the mirror in which we see that basic fact about ourselves, that's all the leadership we should expect from any president. His great fault, the cynic concluded, is that he never pointed that out as directly and (yes) as harshly as he should have. He's not the ninety-eight-pound weakling. America is.

There is one thing about having won your last election, the cynic thought. You see things more clearly, including yourself and your place in the life of the country. There was a rising appeal within the president's party for the kind of economic populism that made many of his advisors nervous, and that had been beyond the party for nearly thirty years. The duck is lame only if it can't keep up with the movement around it. There was energy there, and no little power. There was the ability to create another moment for himself, the mirror image of the moment in which he took office, not a second chance but a different kind of chance, an opportunity not to be the vessel into which people poured so much hope, and an opportunity not to be the caricature that he'd been made out to be by the other side. To control the presidency right up until the moment he had to surrender it, and to shape it to what he wanted to do, consequences be damned, to maintain still that inner ability to create an inevitability within which he could operate. The cynic wondered if he would take it. The cynic wondered if he already hadn't done just that.

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In 1926, seven years after his advice to Woodrow Wilson had been ignored, George L. Record gave a dinner speech. It was the middle of the booming decade that was careering blindly toward a historic economic cataclysm. Record was just as clear-eyed as he ever was. He could have been talking in 2007, before the next collapse came, before Barack Obama got elected and put into motion his own sense of his overriding inevitability to become the man to pull the country out of the muck and mire, despite what seemed to be its irresistible recidivist impulse to hurl itself back in again.

"This is a tough time. It is low tide. There never was a time in the thirty-odd years I have been in active politics when ideas were so utterly repugnant to the average man," Record said. "There never was a time apparently, when people were so disillusioned, cynical, and despairing as to any intellectual proposition. I tried to interest a brilliant friend along those lines, and he said, 'What is the use? When a Rudolph Valentino can drive Charles W. Eliot from the first page to the twenty-first page of The New York Times, what is the use of trying to talk to the American people about any serious subject?' And it is so. It is possible that the Great War was the natural and inevitable culmination of this tremendous force in civilization which we call privilege, and of which there are other forms beside that of land privilege. It may be that that old privilege idea has been shaken to its foundation, and I hope that this is so."

It still might be so, the cynic thought, despite himself. In the end, with nothing left for a president or the country to lose anymore, it still might be so. Against his better judgment, and with winter on the wind again, the cynic thought that it still might be so.

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